Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Choose,” the Black Pearl said, “my lord Ducon. The quick predictable death here, or the long fall into the unknown or the palace cellar, whichever rises to meet you first.”

  He started to stand, to turn and face the dark rather than carry the final memory of her face with him into oblivion. The floor shrugged and rippled as though the entire palace were trying to uproot itself, walk away from the doomed city. It scattered the guards and threw Ducon down again on the charcoal. His hand, outflung for balance, slid in longing and despair across the dark to meet the shadow hand on the door.

  It opened.

  Light poured out around him, blinded him. He heard Camas give a sudden shout. The Black Pearl snapped something. An unbearable streak of silver light swung down at Ducon. Another seared below it, bore it up and out of the luminous, dazzling flood he knelt in, that was nothing he could name or understand except that it was the opposite of shadow.

  Then a hand gripped him, pulled him out of the light. Blinking stars out of his eyes, he saw himself.

  And not himself.

  For the first time, he could see the shimmering flow of power that trailed endlessly away from the man whom Ducon’s charcoal had set free in the taverns of Ombria. It melted through his silvery eyes, turning them a shade darker than Ducon’s, now a shade lighter. Ducon tried to speak, could not. The man studied him as silently. Time and sorrow had etched the thin lines along his mouth, left their memory in his eyes. He still held Ducon’s arm; his fingers tightened slightly, before he spoke.

  “You don’t look at all like your mother.”

  Ducon whispered, “I look like you.”

  “You see what I am.”

  “Yes.” He stopped to swallow. “Now I do. I couldn’t see it before.”

  “You drew me into Ombria. I was a shadow of myself. Being charcoal, I could never speak. I could only watch you.”

  “Watch over me,” Ducon amended. All around them, he realized, other faces from other drawings were crowding into the room, igniting battles with the ensorcelled guards. The shadow doorway, pouring light like a sun, had illumined the impenetrable black opposite it. An army seemed to be spilling out of it along with gusts of rain-streaked wind, the smell of grass, the harsh cries of ravens. His father still kept watch over Ducon’s shoulder at the tumult behind him, his sword raised to guard Ducon’s back. Ducon heard the fighting from a distance; he could not look away from the sorcerer’s face.

  “Did my mother find you?” he asked huskily. “Or did you find her?”

  “Your mother leaped to meet me. Like you, she was drawn to this door.”

  Ducon’s fingers, closing suddenly on his father’s wrist, melted slightly into a glinting aura. “She lived?”

  “She lived and bore you. More than that, I never knew. She returned to the doorway to show you to me. I never saw her again, though for a time I haunted that doorway, and I searched through fire and water for glimpses of her. I knew the moment she died. I knew that you existed in her world, but until you drew me, I never saw your face again.”

  “I followed you that day I first saw you. You led me—” A shadow across Ducon’s thoughts faded; the familiar glimmering currents of power illumined him. “You led me to Faey.”

  “Is that her name? The sorceress who lives underground? We never knew.”

  “What are you, in your world?”

  “I rule, in the reflected world. I do not live underground, and though I am very powerful, I am not immortal.” He loosed Ducon’s arm, touched his face lightly with long, hard fingers. “You seem to have inherited that power in odd ways. You can recognize it and it comes out of your drawings. But you are not a sorcerer?”

  “Neither sorcerer nor ruler. Just a man with a piece of charcoal.” He started at a fierce brawl of swords close behind him. The elusive, gleaming swaths of power seemed to draw closer around them, blurring the battling figures, the noise. “Is the door open forever now?” he asked without hope. “Can you stay?”

  “We came because in your utter despair you found a way to open the door between our worlds. The shadow world is your hope. When you no longer despair, you no longer need us; we fade and you forget. When the sorceress who lives underground is disturbed enough by events to make her way up into the troubled, desperate world above, then she shifts the balance between despair and hope, between light and shadow. She draws us to your world, to restore the ancient balance between us. But it was you who searched for us in your drawings, you who saw into shadow, you who opened the door.”

  “Camas guessed that much,” Ducon said, balanced between bitterness and wonder. “Will I forget you? Did my mother? She never spoke of you.”

  “Perhaps,” his father said gently. “Perhaps not. I never forgot her. There have been other children born belonging to both worlds. They stay where they were born. Like you, they seem haunted by the world they lost.”

  “My mother was able to return to this world through that door?”

  “She belonged here.”

  “My small cousin—” His throat burned; he began again. “My cousin who is—was—Prince of Ombria, and the woman who loved him ran for their lives through that doorway. They belong here. Is there a way back for them?”

  His father shifted a little. The luminous air around them faded enough for Ducon to see the few scattered battles around them, the stray guards still obdurately obeying the Black Pearl’s commands. She herself was nowhere to be found. Camas had vanished with her, into her erratic, secret passageways, perhaps, or into the streets of Ombria, where she would find no opening door that would save her, and no bed except her last.

  “Draw them,” Ducon’s father suggested, and Ducon turned, raised his charcoal to the wall beside the door.

  The first few lines that came out revealed a face that was neither Kyel’s nor Lydea’s. He lifted his arm to brush it away. The eyes seemed to watch him as they had done in life, and he paused, puzzled, then began to draw again. When the charcoal shaped the jet head of a pin floating above a tangled cloud of hair, he stopped again, disturbed by what he recognized, wondering if she, too, had somehow vanished beyond the door. The darkly glittering hues of color that streamed briefly through the charcoal eyes illumined him.

  “Who is that?” his father asked. Behind them, the room was finally silent. “She sees like you do.”

  “Mag,” Ducon said. “She is watching us.” He moved to the other side of the door, where the iris still bloomed, and told his father a story of charcoal and wax while he drew out of the dark the faces of his heart and around him the world he knew drew its own conclusions.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ever After

  The Prince of Ombria and his governess sat together on his bed, gazing at the array of puppets spread across the vast expanse of silk. The prince, who had just finished his midday meal, looked heavy-eyed and drowsy. But he still stifled his yawns, and his hands moved busily among the puppets, choosing, discarding, until they pounced finally on the moon with her crystal eyes and her hands shaped like stars.

  “I will be the moon,” Kyel said. “You must make a wish to me.”

  Lydea slid her fingers into the fox’s head, with its sly smile and fiery velvet pelt. “I wish,” she said, “that you would take your nap.”

  “No,” the prince said patiently, “you must make a true wish. And I will grant it because I am the moon.”

  “Then I must make a fox’s wish. I wish for an open door to every hen house, and the ability to jump into trees.”

  The moon sank onto the blue hillock of Kyel’s knee. “Why?”

  “So that I can escape the farmer’s dogs when they run after me.”

  “Then you should wish,” the prince said promptly, “that you could jump as high as the moon.”

  “A good wish. But there are no hens on the moon, and how would I get back to Ombria?”

  The moon rose again, lifted a golden hand. “On a star.”

  The governess smiled. The fox stroked the prince’s
hair while he shook away the moon and replaced it with the sorceress, who had one amethyst eye and one emerald, and who wore a black cloak that shimmered with ribbons of faint, changing colors.

  “I am the sorceress who lives underground,” the prince said. “Is there really a sorceress who lives underground?”

  “So they—” Lydea checked herself, let the fox speak. “So they say, my lord.”

  “How does she live? Does she have a house?”

  She paused again, glimpsing a barely remembered tale. “I think she does. Maybe even her own city beneath Ombria. Some say that she has an ancient enemy, who appears during harsh and perilous times in Ombria’s history. Then and only then does the sorceress make her way out of her underground world to fight the evil and restore hope to Ombria.”

  “My tutor goes everywhere in Ombria. Maybe she knows where the sorceress lives.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at anything your tutor knows.”

  The sorceress descended, long nose down on the silk. Kyel picked another puppet up, looked at it silently a moment. The queen of pirates, whose black nails curved like scimitars, whose hair was a rigid knoll in which she kept her weapons, stared back at him out of glittering onyx eyes. Kyel put her down as silently, frowning slightly. He lay back on his pillows. Lydea pushed the puppets away from him and began to rise.

  “No,” the prince said sleepily. “Stay. Tell me a story.”

  “And then you must sleep.” She settled herself beside him, absently picked up the black sheep, whose eyes were silvery, whose long mouth curled into the faintest smile.

  “Tell me the story of the locket.”

  “Once upon a time, my lord, in the best and the worst of all possible worlds, a princess fell in love with a young man who loved to draw pictures.”

  “Like Ducon.”

  “Very like your cousin. Every day for a year, she gave him a rose. She would pick it at dawn from her father’s gardens and then take it to the highest place in the castle, a place so high that everyone had forgotten about it except for the doves that nested beneath the broken roof. There, she had found a secret door between the best and the worst of the worlds. Every day, they would meet on the threshold of that door. She would give him a rose, and he would give her a drawing of the city he lived in. They loved each other very much, but of course they could never marry, because they were from different worlds: she was a princess and he an artist who had to paint tavern signs to keep himself fed.

  “One day, after a year had passed, the princess brought him a child along with a rose. It was the happiest day of her life because she had given him their child, and also the saddest day of her life, because he came to her with his heart’s blood on his paper instead of a drawing. Someone had seen him with the princess and had punished him. So, in her love and sorrow, she crossed the threshold to his world, to stay with him while he breathed his last.”

  “His last what?”

  “Breath. In her grief, she pulled the locket from her throat and placed into it a rose petal, three drops of his blood, and a sliver of his charcoal. But after he died, she found that she could not get back into her world with the child, because it was half of the best and half of the worst, and neither world would accept the baby. But the princess, after many days and nights of ceaseless weeping and searching, finally left the child with a wise and powerful woman who would know, with her vast knowledge and experience, how to raise a child of both worlds. At last the princess could return to her own world. The only thing she had to leave with her child was the locket, which held all the memories of her love…”

  Lydea heard Kyel’s even breathing and stopped. She pulled the coverlet over him and slid gently off the bed, seeing only then that the regent stood in the doorway.

  How long he had been listening, she did not know. She dropped a curtsey, which erased the hairline furrow in his brow. He gave a last glance to the child in the bed and followed her out; the prince’s attendants slipped in after her to wait for him to wake.

  Ducon had regained something of his sense of humor after having lost it for weeks to the precarious position he had attained. The footloose artist had been forced to learn to rule a city after his uncle’s death. He looked older, harried, and much tidier. It was as though at his uncle’s death he had suddenly seen Ombria for the first time. All the broken piers he had wandered over must be fixed; the troubled, dangerous streets he had roamed at all hours must be made safe; the street urchins must be caught like stray dogs, fed and schooled. He had declared war on the black-sailed ships that had commandeered the ports. Every day brought him an endless list of complaints, injustices, charges, petitions. Lydea expected him to vanish out of the palace, as had been his habit once, leaving it anyone’s guess where he had gone.

  So far he hadn’t. She found him with her at odd times, as though he used her in some way as an escape. Perhaps, she thought, it was the tavern-wench he saw beneath the governess’s sober garb that drew him. She was as close as he could get to the life he had lost.

  “Lavender,” he commented, looking at the ribbons in her sleeve.

  “The prince was tired, he said, of looking at so much black.”

  “So am I,” he breathed. “It seems we have been in mourning forever.”

  Sorrow caught her, as it did sometimes unexpectedly: a thumbprint of fire in the hollow of her throat. She swallowed it, said only, “Because you have been working so hard, my lord.”

  “I’m not used to it yet.” He measured a trailing end of the ribbon at her wrist between his fingers, oblivious of the guards and hovering officials who had followed him. It was the color, she understood, that caught him: her hair, the ribbons, the little brush strokes of satin and jewel that the puppets made, scattered across the deep blue silk. He added impulsively, “Perhaps I’ll come with you this afternoon.”

  The thought made her smile. “To my father’s tavern? It’s hardly for the likes of you.”

  “I’ve been to—”

  “I know, my lord: every tavern in Ombria but the Rose and Thorn. I wonder how you missed it.” Then, out of nowhere, a chill of fear blew through her; she heard herself say, “We can’t both leave the prince. Not both of us at once.”

  He gave her a strange look, not of surprise, but a reflection of her fear, which she found odder still. He loosed the ribbon, nodded, his eyes returning briefly to the prince’s door. “Perhaps you’re right. He knows where you’re going?”

  “He knows, my lord. But I’ll be back before he remembers that I’m gone.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “Tell your father that I will come and draw in his tavern some day.”

  But that was idle wishing, she knew. Already he was a legend in certain parts of the city, and legends, having made themselves so, rarely returned to repeat their feats. He seemed to read her mind. His eyes, clear, faintly smiling, held hers a moment.

  “Not,” he said, “an idle wish.”

  A promise, his eyes told her. She blinked, then dismissed the half-glimpsed idea that had rolled like a sea creature on the surface of her mind, then dove back down, so deeply that she had forgotten it before she returned to her chamber.

  High, she found herself thinking, and low, and now in the middle. She had a view of the trellises in the gardens, but not of the sea. But she had never been that low in the palace, except once, with the regent, who had taken her there for some obscure reason… Perhaps he had simply wanted her to see how they lived, those who never raised their eyes in passageways, who never spoke.

  “This palace,” he had said, “is a small city, past lying close to present like one shoe next to another. If you look at them in a mirror, left becomes right, present becomes past…”

  Shoes… Her mind turned oddly on them, as she tidied herself and drew on a hooded cloak. The days had grown shorter; the direction of the wind had changed. She was walking down a hallway, well lit and guarded, when a small door hidden in the wall clicked open and she froze, both hands over her mouth to stifle a
scream of terror.

  Mag came out of the wall. She looked stricken herself at the sight of Lydea, who dropped her hands quickly and wondered at her own pounding heart.

  “I’m so sorry,” the tutor said guiltily. “I was exploring.”

  “I don’t know why I was so frightened.”

  “I know. It’s all right. Here.” She stooped to pick up the elegant rose-wood box that Lydea had dropped.

  “It’s for my father,” Lydea said dazedly. “He keeps his money in an old boot.”

  “Have you seen him since Royce Greve died?”

  “Only once. He’ll be wondering. I was—somewhat distraught, then.”

  Mag nodded gravely. She was young to be tutoring a prince, but the regent had chosen her. She replaced Camas Erl, who had taken a long journey to study flora and fauna in the outermost islands of the southern seas. He had left shortly after Royce’s death, and would be gone, he had said, indefinitely. Lydea found Mag’s knowledge astonishing, and had gotten into the habit of taking lessons with the prince. They helped each other study, sometimes with the aid of puppets.

  Lydea, past her strange terror, was piqued. “What’s in there?”

  “Another palace. Rooms no one uses, dusty passageways, secret doors everywhere.” She was watching Lydea, her calm eyes taking note of every change in Lydea’s expression. Mag saw everything, it seemed, and she remembered everything… She added, unpredictably, “I saw your father two days ago.”

  “You were in that part of the city? Alone?”

  “You go alone.”

  “But it’s where I grew up.”

  Mag nodded. She had a confused past herself, involving brothels and alchemists and the grimier face of Ombria. Which was why, Lydea assumed, Ducon had chosen her. “So did I,” Mag said. “I looked in on your father. The Rose and Thorn was quite full; I imagine his boot is filling up.”